I went through a phase in grade school where I was totally obsessed with Mount St. Helens. I read everything I could my grubby, little paws on. I wrote an extra-credit report on the subject. And, as a result, I now get the same kind of emotional memory twinge from the mention of stubborn, ill-fated innkeeper Harry R. Truman and the North Fork Toutle River that I also get from, say, "Doin' the Pigeon".
I meant to post something about the anniversary of Mount St. Helens' 1980 eruption on, you know, the anniversary (which was back on May 18). Today, though, I ran across a nifty slideshow from Scientific American about 11 things science learned from that eruption.
For example—and news-peg value—some of Mount St. Helens after-eruptions caused the first recorded case of an aircraft engine being taken out by volcanic ash. Unlike our current situation with Eyjafjallajokull, nobody cleared the airspace over Mount St. Helens. Nobody thought you needed to. The main eruption happened on a clear day, so pilots simply avoided the ash plume. But, later in the week, when the weather turned cloudy, they couldn't. Pilots were able to get the damaged plane's engines restarted, and nobody died, but the incident ultimately led to the kind of flight restrictions that stranded our Lisa Katayama in Europe last month.
